Recognizing products: A per-exemplar multi-label image classification approach

Abstract

Large-scale instance-level image retrieval aims at retrieving specific instances of objects or scenes. Simultaneously retrieving multiple objects in a test image adds to the difficulty of the problem, especially if the objects are visually similar. This paper presents an efficient approach for per-exemplar multi-label image classification, which targets the recognition and localization of products in retail store images. We achieve runtime efficiency through the use of discriminative random forests, deformable dense pixel matching and genetic algorithm optimization. Cross-dataset recognition is performed, where our training images are taken in ideal conditions with only one single training image per product label, while the evaluation set is taken using a mobile phone in real-life scenarios in completely different conditions. In addition, we provide a large novel dataset and labeling tools for products image search, to motivate further research efforts on multi-label retail products image classification. The proposed approach achieves promising results in terms of both accuracy and runtime efficiency on 680 annotated images of our dataset, and 885 test images of GroZi-120 dataset. We make our dataset of 8350 different product images and the 680 test images from retail stores with complete annotations available to the wider community. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.